Shtetl Novelist Honed His Pen Under The Gun

October 20, 1986|By Ron Grossman.

Mine was a most unusual literary apprenticeship,`` said author Aharon Appelfeld. ``Totally illiterate and highly lethal.``

Before his recent appearance here in a series of lectures by Israeli writers, the Romanian-born Appelfeld was giving his host, Rabbi Joel Poupko of the Jewish Community Centers, a Yiddish-language version of the unlikely route he took to his novelist`s calling.

Seated at a table in the chandelier-bedecked Hyatt Lincolnwood hotel and sipping hot tea from a glass, in the Eastern European manner, Appelfeld himself seemed a historic fragment of the vanished world of pre-war Jewry, a world that is the centerpiece of his writing.

``At the outbreak of World War II, we lived in the town of Czernovitz,``

Appelfeld said. ``I was about 8 and my parents about 30. In our family we had true believers and converts to Christianity, anarchists, communists and Zionists.``

Shortly thereafter, Appelfeld found himself virtually the sole surviving member of that clan. With only a child`s experience, he was compelled to define his own individual variation on his ancestral heritage.

At first, the circumstances of the war provided clear-cut guidelines. When the Nazis marched into his hometown, Appelfeld`s mother was killed, and he and his father got separated while being deported to the concentration camps. Soon he found himself face-to-face with the stark realities of life behind barbed wire.

``It`s no wonder that when, long afterward, I began to read, Kafka was my mentor. At a schoolboy`s age, I was confronted with the `Jewish secret`: To my captors, I was a danger simply because of my existence. My Jewishness was a death sentence,`` Appelfeld recalls of his precocious awakening.

``One night, I crawled underneath the camp`s fence and escaped. How much did I understand of my circumstances? I don`t know. It was the reflex action of a child--almost the instincts of an animal--who realized that inside that wire the only certainty was death.``

Outside the camp, the issues were more complex, but just as dangerous. The peasants of the Ukraine, where he found himself, could not afford to be neutral in the racial wars of their Nazi occupiers. So for the next three years, Appelfeld wandered from town to town, fearing to stay too long in one place, and skirting the middle class, whose insistence on cleanliness and bathing might force him to disclose the physical evidence of his heritage.

``I always preferred to sleep in the barn, where only the animals could see my circumcision,`` Appelfeld said. ``And I liked to stay with marginal types: prostitutes, horse thieves and fortune tellers. Outsiders don`t ask too many questions.``

Even so, Appelfeld`s hosts forced him into a curious kind of psychological double bind. The more he was forced to conceal his Jewishness from others` eyes, the more it became important to him not to forget his heritage. His parents` home, Appelfeld explained, had been a secular and an assimilated one. Appelfeld`s father had swapped his grandfather`s belief in Jehovah in favor of a commitment to science.

``Before the war we had lived surrounded by Orthodox Jews and were disdainful of them,`` Appelfeld said. ``But in the Ukraine, living always with the possibility of death, I could sense, even as a child, the failure of the rationalist`s creed. Shed our distinctiveness, my father`s generation believed, and the gentile world will accept us for what we are. Now, sleeping alongside cows and sheep and horses, I realized that the reverse was true:

They wanted to kill me for what I was.``

Nor was he alone with such paradoxes. One prostitute, for whom he worked as a servant, often would bemoan the loss of her former Jewish patrons. ``They were real gentlemen,`` she would lecture the young Appelfeld, who all the while feared least she see through his disguise. ``Not at all like these ill- mannered peasants. My Jewish customers used to bring little gifts and treat me like a lady.``

After three years of such adventures, Appelfeld was liberated by a Soviet army unit. His new soldier friends took him along on their campaigns through the Balkans, where he met up with a group of Jewish boys who had similarly survived the Holocaust by their wits.

Together they made contact with the Jewish Brigade that was serving with the British Army, and from there, Appelfeld made his way to Palestine. He arrived just in time to serve in Israel`s War of Independence--and to belately learn to read and write. He was 16.

Curiously, that 1948 war, which established a Jewish homeland for the first time in 2,000 years, also contributed to Appelfeld`s literary confusion. The country`s new leadership was convinced that the only way to safeguard its creation was to erase all cultural vestiges of the Eastern European phase of their people`s history. ``They were determined to transform the passive, stooped-over ghetto Jew into a blond Aryan overnight,`` Appelfeld recalled.